Inside the cabin, Marshall sat on the edge of the padded metal seat, craning forward into the circular window. Deborah crouched behind him, switching on the radio channel to the Operations Room.
They made their way into Trafalgar Square, turned up the west side toward the National Gallery. It was one o'clock but the air was dark and gray, the sky overcast. Only the continuously flickering tracerlike striations across the air gave any indication of the air stream's enormous speed. They reached Canada House and the Cunard building on the west side of the square, and the walls of sandbags and the exposed cornices above flickered with the violent impact of the dust clouds.
Nelson's Column was down. Two weeks earlier, when the wind had reached 95 mph, a crack which had passed unnoticed for 75 years suddenly revealed itself a third of the way up the shaft. The next day the upper section had toppled, the shattered cylindrical segments still lying where they had fallen among the four bronze lions.
The square was deserted. Along the north side a tunnel of sandbags ran from the Haymarket and turned up into Charing Cross Road. Only military personnel and police used these covered runways; everyone else was indoors, refusing to venture out until the wind abated. The new office blocks along the Strand and the clubs along Pall Mall were heavily sandbagged and looked as if they had been abandoned by their occupants to sustain alone the terrors of some apocalyptic air raid. Most of the smaller office buildings had been left unprotected, however, and their windows had been stripped away, their floors and ceilings gutted.
As they turned into Charing Cross Road Marshall noted that the Garrick Theatre had collapsed. The unsupported auditorium walls had caved in completely, and the arcs of the dress and upper circles now looked down onto a windswept pile of rubble. The lines of seats were being stripped away like dominoes. Marshall watched them explode off their moorings and cannonade out into the street, as if jerked away on the end of enormous hawsers, disintegrating as they flew.
As they moved up Shaftesbury Avenue toward Holborn, Marshall waved Deborah forward and she joined him and rested her elbows on the traverse. In the dim light of the cabin she could see the strong edge of Marshall 's jaw and forehead illuminated in profile. For some reason he was undeterred by the immense force of the wind.
He put his hand over hers. "Frightened, Deborah?"
She moved her fingers, held his hand tightly. "I'm not just frightened, Simon. Staring out here-it's like looking onto a city of hell. Everything's so totally uncertain, and I'm sure this isn't the end."
Searchlights played across Kingsway as they crossed the road, shone into the observation window and momentarily dazzled them. The Bethlehem halted at the intersection while Musgrave spoke to the command post dug into the mouth of Holborn Underground Station. Ahead, along Southampton Row, was a group of vehicles-three Centurion tanks, each pulling a steel trailer.
Musgrave joined them, and together the column moved slowly up toward Russell Square. More vehicles were drawn up by the collapsed hotel, others were moving about in the square, their tracks flattening the tattered remains of the few bushes and shreds of wire fencing that still protruded from the beaten ground. Two Bethlehems with RN insignia were up on the edge of the pavement in front of the hotel, playing their searchlights onto the jumble of telescoped floors.
They moved around the block to the windward side. Here a line of Centurion tanks was drawn up, sandbags piled between them, steel hoods mounted on their track guards locked end to end to form a windshield, giving the rescue squads digging their way into the basement sufficient protection to move around. Their success was hard to assess, but Marshall realized that few survivors could be expected. The heavy rescue rigs-all originally designed and built for World War III and now pulled out of their mothballs- needed more freedom of movement. There were huge draglines, mounted on tracks as high as a man, fitted with hinged booms that could reach between two telescoped floors. One of them was feeling its way tentatively below the buckled lintels of the second floor like a giant hand reaching into a deep pocket, but the wind sent it slamming from side to side, and the crew in their armored cab found it impossible to control.
Musgrave drove the Bethlehem up onto the opposite pavement, and they edged past the line of vehicles to where a massive tractor, almost as big as a house, 60-foot-long steel booms jutting up from its front like the twin jibs of a sailing ship, was edging a circular steel escape shaft into position. The shaft pivoted between the booms. The lower end drove through a narrow window below the edge of the pavement, then powerful hydraulic rams extended it downward into the matrix of the ruin. Inside the shaft, rescue teams equipped with steel props would spread out across the basement, crawling along the foot-high space that was probably all that was left of the floor.
Next to it were two more tracked vehicles, fitted with conveyor belts that carried an endless stream of rubble away from the ruin and dumped them onto the roadway behind. Some of the fragments of masonry were six feet long-massive blocks of fractured concrete that weighed half a ton.
"If there's anyone alive in there they'll find them," Marshall said to Deborah. Just then the Bethlehem slid into reverse and backed suddenly, throwing them against the traverse. Marshall swore, holding his left elbow, the arm paralyzed for a moment. Deborah had struck her forehead against the steel rim. She pushed herself away and Marshall was about to go to her aid when he heard Musgrave jabber excitedly over the intercom.
"Look out, sir! The conveyor's going over!"
Marshall leaped to the window. The wind had caught one of the two conveyors, swung the 30-foot-high escalator around like a balsawood dummy. The huge vehicle swiveled helplessly. Its tracks tautened as the twin diesels pulled, and the driver backed the whole unit away from the ruin, trying to regain its balance. Moving in a sharp arc, it backed straight toward the opposite pavement, where the Bethlehem had stalled with its rear wheels jammed against the steps of one of the houses.
Before they collided the conveyor driver saw the Bethlehem in his rear mirror and retroversed the tracks, the great steel cleats stabbing through the surface of the roadway, locking in a sudden spasm. Immediately the 20 grab buckets swung back and inverted, tipping their contents into the roadway below.
A fragment of masonry 15 feet long, a virtually intact section of balcony, fell straight onto the hood of the Bethlehem. The car slammed down onto its front axle, rear wheels bouncing off the pavement. Arms shielding his head, Marshall was hurled around the cabin. Deborah knocked off her feet. When the car finally steadied he bent down over Deborah and helped her off the floor onto the seat.
The front suspension of the Bethlehem had collapsed and the floor tilted downward. Marshall leaned over, peered through the window, and saw the long slab of concrete which straddled the hood, its lower edge penetrating the driver's hatchway.
"Musgrave!" Marshall bellowed into the intercom. "Musgrave! Are you all right, man?"
He dropped the mike, bent down under the traverse and wrenched back the radio set, hammering on the hinged panel that sealed off the cabin from the driver's compartment. Musgrave bad locked it from his side. Marshall tore at the edges of the panel, managed to pull the one-eighth inch plate back off its louvers. Through the crack he could see the hunched form of the driver. He bad slipped off his seat, was stuffed head down into the narrow interval below the driving columns.
Marshall pulled himself to his feet, climbed up onto the edge of the traverse and unlocked the hatch bars. Deborah jumped up and tried to hold him back, but he shouldered her off and punched the hatch sections up into the air. Air whirled into the cabin, gusts of stinging dust carried down from the ruined hotel. Hesitating for a moment, Marshall heaved himself up into the air, head and trunk out of the hatch.